Common Folk Collective

Do you like this screen? You’re going to see it a lot.

I’ve always been a gadget nerd. From the Palm Pilot to the original Blackberry, I’ve collected them all. Even more so when it comes to phones. One of my best consulting gigs was researching wireless technologies, I got paid for one year to do what I would have done anyway. As such my mobile phone purchases are major life decisions to me.

For the last year or so I’ve been using the Samsung Galaxy S2 Epic 4G Touch on Sprint. When I first got the SGS2 I was pretty happy. The screen was crisp and clear and I even had a peppy 4G (WiMax) connection in most of DC. But despite playing with several power saving techniques I couldn’t get the battery to last a whole day, even though it never really became an issue because I had a power charger at work and at home. This didn’t last.

A few months ago the Ice Cream Sandwich release of Android was pushed to my phone. This is where the real problems started. The first casualty was the contacts application. The app would just open to a blank screen about 5 minutes later (meanwhile the phone was getting hot). I would be informed that the contacts app wasn’t responding and I was prompted to close it. I could have worked around this annoyance but this was only the beginning. The last two problems proved too difficult to overcome. For one, the battery started to last only 4 to 6 hours. The final straw that broke the camel’s back though was the new feature, pressing send on txt messages would cause the phone to shutdown about 60% of the time.

So I’ve rejoined the masses and picked up an iPhone 5 and so far, so good.